Stephen King, Hemingway, Vonnegut, and Orwell detest it. Herman Melville, Henry James, and Rebecca Solnit love it. But why? When is it effective? Have we been misusing it? Should we even care?In Semicolon, Cecelia Watson charts the rise and fall of this infamous punctuation mark, which for years was the trendiest one in the world of letters. But in the nineteenth century, as grammar books became all the rage, the rules of how we use language became both stricter and more confusing, with the semicolon a prime victim. Taking us on a breezy journey through a range of examples—from Milton’s manuscripts to Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letters from Birmingham Jail” to Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep—Watson reveals how traditional grammar rules make us less successful at communicating with each other than we’d think. Even the most die-hard grammar fanatics would be better served by tossing the rule books and learning a better way to engage with language.Through her rollicking biography of the semicolon, Watson writes a guide to grammar that explains why we don’t need guides at all, and refocuses our attention on the deepest, most primary value of language: true communication.

    But "the West" is the more dangerous mirage of our own time, Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit argue, and the idea of "the West" in the minds of its self-proclaimed enemies remains largely unexamined and woefully misunderstood. Occidentalism is their groundbreaking investigation of the demonizing fantasies and stereotypes about the Western world that fuel such hatred in the hearts of others.We generally understand "radical Islam" as a purely Islamic phenomenon, but Buruma and Margalit show that while the Islamic part of radical Islam certainly is, the radical part owes a primary debt of inheritance to the West. Whatever else they are, al Qaeda and its ilk are revolutionary anti-Western political movements, and Buruma and Margalit show us that the bogeyman of the West who stalks their thinking is the same one who has haunted the thoughts of many other revolutionary groups, going back to the early nineteenth century. In this genealogy of the components of the anti-Western worldview, the same oppositions appear again and again: the heroic revolutionary versus the timid, soft bourgeois; the rootless, deracinated cosmopolitan living in the Western city, cut off from the roots of a spiritually healthy society; the sterile Western mind, all reason and no soul; the machine society, controlled from the center by a cabal of insiders—often Jews—pulling the hidden levers of power versus an organically knit-together one, a society of "blood and soil." The anti-Western virus has found a ready host in the Islamic world for a number of legitimate reasons, they argue, but in no way does that make it an exclusively Islamic matter.A work of extraordinary range and erudition, Occidentalism will permanently enlarge our collective frame of vision

    The phenomenon known as language death has started to accelerate as the world has grown smaller.This extinction of languages, and the knowledge therein, has no parallel in human history. K. David Harrison's book is the first to focus on the essential question, what is lost when a language dies? What forms of knowledge are embedded in a language's structure and vocabulary? And how harmful is it to humanity that such knowledge is lost forever?Harrison spans the globe from Siberia, to North America, to the Himalayas and elsewhere, to look at the human knowledge that is slowly being lost as the languages that express it fade from sight. He uses fascinating anecdotes and portraits of some of these languages' last remaining speakers, in order to demonstrate that this knowledge about ourselves and the world is inherently precious and once gone, will be lost forever. This knowledge is not only our cultural heritage (oral histories, poetry, stories, etc.) but very useful knowledge about plants, animals, the seasons, and other aspects of the natural world--not to mention our understanding of the capacities of the human mind. Harrison's book is a testament not only to the pressing issue of language death, but to the remarkable span of human knowledge and ingenuity. It will fascinate linguists, anthropologists, and general readers.

    one of the most important and readable works on the human past published in recent years."Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a national bestseller: the global account of the rise of civilization that is also a stunning refutation of ideas of human development based on race.In this "artful, informative, and delightful" (William H. McNeill, New York Review of Books) book, Jared Diamond convincingly argues that geographical and environmental factors shaped the modern world. Societies that had a head start in food production advanced beyond the hunter-gatherer stage, and then developed writing, technology, government, and organized religion—as well as nasty germs and potent weapons of war—and adventured on sea and land to conquer and decimate preliterate cultures. A major advance in our understanding of human societies, Guns, Germs, and Steel chronicles the way that the modern world came to be and stunningly dismantles racially based theories of human history.Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science, the Rhone-Poulenc Prize, and the Commonwealth Club of California's Gold Medal

    But what happens when this system of adjusting emotions is adapted to commercial purposes? Hochschild examines the cost of this kind of "emotional labor." She vividly describes from a humanist and feminist perspective the process of estrangement from personal feelings and its role as an "occupational hazard" for one-third of America's workforce.

    Renowned scientist David Bohm believed there was a better way for humanity to discover meaning and to achieve harmony. He identified creative dialogue, a sharing of assumptions and understanding, as a means by which the individual, and society as a whole, can learn more about themselves and others, and achieve a renewed sense of purpose.

    The readings have broad anthropological appeal, emphasizing cultural anthropology in the North American and European traditions.Thematic coverage begins with nineteenth-century foundations and forerunners, before moving on to the early and mid-twentieth century when anthropology comes of age. The last section looks at numerous late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-centurydevelopments in anthropological theory, including feminist anthropology, postmodernity, medical anthropology, and globalization. "

    Get the most recent updates on MLA citation in a convenient, 40-page resource based on The MLA Handbook, 8th Edition, with plenty of models. Browse our catalog or contact your representative for a full listing of updated titles and packages, or to request a custom ISBN.The unique collaborative effort of a professor of English and a professor of philosophy, Current Issues and Enduring Questions is an extensive resource for teaching argument, persuasive writing, and rigorous critical thinking. This extraordinarily versatile text and reader continues to address current student interests and trends in argument, research, and writing.Its comprehensive coverage of classic and contemporary approaches to argument includes Aristotelian, Toulmin, and a range of alternative views, including a new chapter on analyzing and writing about arguments in popular culture. Readings on contemporary controversies (including student loan debt, locavorism, and the boundaries of online privacy) and classical philosophical questions (such as How free is the will of the individual?) are sure to spark student interest and lively discussion and writing, and new e-Pages take advantage of what the Web can do by including videos, speeches, film trailers, and other multimodal arguments.

    Urry develops this analysis through various levels - historical, economic, social, cultural and visual.Mass tourism is charted from its origins in the English seaside resorts to its development as a global industry. The economic impact and complex social relations involved in international tourism are explored. Changing patterns of tourism are shown to be connected to the broader cultural changes of postmodernism and related to the role of the service and middle classes. The author argues that we

    his incontrovertible excellence as an historian, and his authoritative and highly readable prose'. Recent events in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics have since reinforced the central importance of nationalism in the history of political evolution and upheaval. This second edition has been updated in the light of those events, with a final chapter addressing the impact of the dramatic changes that have taken place. It also includes additional maps to illustrate nationalities, languages and political divisions across Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

    It seeks to answer such questions as: How can a language reflect the status of children and older people? Do men and women talk differently? How can our use of language mark our ethnic identity? It also looks at language use in politics and the media and investigates how language affects and constructs our identities, exploring notions of correctness and attitudes towards language use.This third edition of this bestselling book has been completely revised to include recent developments in theory and research and offers the following features:a range of new and engaging international examples drawn from everyday life: beauty advertisements, conversation transcripts, newspaper headlines reporting on asylum seekers, language themed cartoons, and excerpts from the television programme South Park and satirical news website The Onion new activities designed to give students a real understanding of the topic a new chapter covering 'Student Projects' giving readers suggestions on how to further explore the topics covered in the book updated and expanded further reading sections for each chapter and a glossary.While it can be used as a stand-alone text, this edition of Language, Society and Power has also been fully cross-referenced with the new companion title: The Language, Society and Power Reader. Together these books provide the complete resource for students of English language and linguistics, media, communication, cultural studies, sociology and psychology."

    Before this classic appeared, little was known of the way children think. In 1923, however, Jean Piaget, the most important developmental psychologist of the twentieth century, took the psychological world by storm with The Language and Thought of the Child. Applying for the first time the insights of social psychology and psychoanalysis to the observation of children, he uncovered the ways in which a child actively constructs his or her understanding of the world through language. The book has since been a source of inspiration and guidance to generations of parents and teachers. While its conclusions remain contentious to this very day, few can deny the huge debt we owe to this pioneering work in our continuing attempts to understand the minds of the child.

    Challenging the reductionist division of people by race, religion, and class, Sen presents an inspiring vision of a world that can be made to move toward peace as firmly as it has spiraled in recent years toward brutality and war.

    The texts discussed are taken from a broad range of languages - English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Punjabi, Portuguese and Spanish - and English translations are provided. A wide variety of text types is analysed, including a tourist brochure, a children's cookery book, a Harry Potter novel, the Bible, literary reviews and translators' prefaces, film translation, a technical text and a European Parliament speech. Each chapter includes the following features: * a table introducing key concepts * an introduction outlining the translation theory or theories * illustrative texts with translations * a chapter summary * discussion points and exercises.Including a general introduction, an extensive bibliography, and websites for further information, this is a practical, user-friendly textbook that gives a balanced and comprehensive insight into translation studies.

    This is a lively overview of the major ideas and concepts in archaeological theory.